This section provides background information related to the present disclosure that is not necessarily prior art. The camouflage industry has had specialty designers that work in small groups of experts, and do minimal, low quantity testing of patterns and colors in narrow use cases and with only very specific backgrounds and environments. This can lead to patterns being developed that are trendy, but not particularly effective, or the use of patterns and colors that do not work well with a given environment. Past survey or quantitative research may have been so low volume to be within a sampling error, given the narrow scope of testing. Some embodiments can rank patterns and backgrounds based on amount of response variation and the statistical significance of the results with a large and ever-growing sample size.
As depicted in FIGS. 1-3, currently each pattern and color is developed to specifically match a narrowly defined environment and season, and outside of that focused testing, the pattern can, in many cases, be substantially less effective.
Among consumers, especially aspirational or non-professional consumers, many patterns are selected for purely aesthetic or fashion reasons, i.e. “they look cool” or their friends have them, and not because there is a measured accuracy of a low failure rate against their particular operating environment. These camouflage pattern, while tests, are not optimized to decrease the chance of observation.